News and Culture Intertwined

Books: Weapons of the Enemy?

Since the beginning of time, books have been used to confuse and manipulate the weak and the simple-minded.

Take the Bible, for example. It is and has always been the worldwide best-seller. Why? Is the writing particularly good? Any fourth-grader will tell you otherwise. Does it elicit any sense of self-understanding or emotional enlightenment? Clearly not.

And yet it continues to fill the pockets of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and those other fucks who wrote it back in the ’60s.

Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit-451 has taught every high-school freshman in the country that knowledge is power, and that abusive and tyrannical governments will try to take that power away from us by depriving us of our access to knowledge.

But the question that should be gnawing at your pelvis is: Isn’t Fahrenheit-451 a book? Couldn’t it be trying to indoctrinate us with some propaganda that books are somehow worth a damn (apart from their clear practical purpose as a thing against which one can rest an iPhone)?

This conclusion only makes sense: Why should we think that Ray has your interests at heart? He doesn’t give a shit. He’s just trying to afford that Lambo. You know, the orange one with the black stripes.

The only logical way to fight this systematic and institutional oppression of the human mind, then, is to boycott books. Burn them. Use them as kindling for your wood stove in the study. Write notes on them in Sharpie. Tear out the pages and make little paper airplanes. Just don’t read them.

In the immortal words of Susan B. Anthony, “Where did knowledge ever get anyone?”